Tootfinder

In #Wikimedia land, I created my first #Lua module in #WikimediaCommons:

This week the Argentine Navy finally retired the S-2 Turbo Tracker after 63 years of service. I was able to see one of it's final flights last month. A beautiful aircraft made for another era, it was time to finally get some rest.
https://commons.gallery/@bugwarp/jornada-bapi

Even before "AI", there was a retreat into the more private digital spaces, like closed instant messaging groups etc to avoid spam/bots/surveillance etc. But the drastically increased rate at which our public online commons are being polluted, thanks to "AI" slop will just accelerate this retreat.
It's really sad to see the open, weird web disappear like that, even if I understand the reasons why.

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol

"Arduino wasn’t valuable because it was just a microcontroller company. It was valuable because it was a commons. And you can’t apply enterprise legal frameworks to a commons without destroying it"
You also can't buy a #commons, at least without destroying it as a commons. The key point about a commons is that it isn't property.

Did Qualcomm kill Arduino for good? | Molecularist
The maker community worried Qualcomm would kill the Arduino ethos. New T&Cs confirm the community's worst fears. Here's what's at stake, what Qualcomm got wrong, and what might still be salvaged.

Just added a “Sign in with Mastodon” example to Kitten’s¹ examples:
https://codeberg.org/kitten/app/src/branch/main/examples/sign-in-with-mastodon
If I have time at some point, I might make it into a tutorial.
Enjoy!
:kitten:💕

The tragedy of the commons is not that it is wasted but that the beneficiaries don't band together to stop its unsustainable and unfair exploitation.

Making Sense of Open-Source: Ideals, Reality, and What's on the Horizon
Hosted by the Sensemaking Scenius and featuring @erlend.sh, an online video gathering Dec 3rd
https://smokesignal.events/did:plc:ad5bwszsc5m5jpj2sfa6uzjk/3m62suufa7y2j

Orchids are famous for specialized flowers that create species isolation by manipulating pollinators— but these ones don't have specialized pollinator relationships. Instead, they're isolated by pollen incompatibilities.
https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcaf271

If you are up this late, maybe you want to stay up later. Go ahead, read my latest essay, What Did Vibe Coding just do to the Commons?
https://varnelis.net/works_and_projects/what-did-vibe-coding-just-do-to-the-commons/

What did Vibe Coding just do to the Commons? - varnelis.net
I write a lot about art and architecture, landscape, and the impact of technology on culture, but I haven’t written about coding since the 1980s, when I sold my first article to Creative Computing magazine. Back then I was a high school kid, spending hours working in both BASIC and 6502 assembler on the VIC-20. I ...

The Trump administration is dismantling the last of the public commons.
It’s cutting billions to state programs tracking disease,
repealing emissions and drinking water regulations,
revoking hundreds of millions in funding for life-saving research,
canceling local food programs for schools and food banks,
rolling back vaccinations,
and shutting down the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Commi…

“Make America Healthy Again” Aims to Make Public Health Your Private Responsibility
The message coming from the Trump administration is: “Take care of yourselves — because we won’t.”…

BC Ministry of Transport...
Launching Gantry, 152 Street Station
The Surrey Sprinter launching gantry lifting an elevated guideway segment at 152 Street Station.Date taken: 10-06-2025
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tranbc/albums/72177720298782138

Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year
By Diego Delso, CC-BY-SA
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2024/Results/All

Good Morning #Canada
December 15th, 1964, the Canadian House of Commons votes 163 to 78 to approve the red Maple Leaf flag. The vote put an end to years of conflict over the Liberals proposing a new flag, and gave Canada a new symbol for its upcoming 100th birthday celebration. In 1960, Lester B. Pearson, then Leader of the Opposition, declared that he was determined to solve what he called “the flag problem.” To Pearson, this issue was critical to defining Canada as a unified, independent country. As the newly elected Prime Minister in 1963, Pearson promised to resolve the question of a new national flag in time for Canada’s centennial celebrations in 1967. Traditionalists fought for their beloved Union Jack while a younger generation wanted a new modern design to represent Canada. Thousands of designs, some truly ugly, were considered and rejected, including Pearson's preferred flag. I think we did OK in the end.
#CanadaIsAwesome #History
https://youtu.be/qTMdH9-kmDk?si=9G9ykcp7wpxihKQR

TIL about Widmanstätten-structures, a pattern of cross-hatching lines on the surface of iron-rich meteorites. The pattern was named after Alois Joseph Franz Xaver Beck Edler von Widmanstätten.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widmanstätten_pattern

Additionally, made around 2,800 contributions on @… (probably a good bit less, as Forgejo seems to over-count, but still).
And ~350 contributions to Wikimedia Commons.
Glad for the privilege of having time to contribute to digital commons like that!♥️

Vibe coding is the single biggest transformation since ChatGPT 3.5, it is one of the biggest transformations since the dawn of computing. It will thoroughly transform Open Source. We are not ready. #VibeCoding #OpenSource

What did Vibe Coding just do to the Commons? - varnelis.net
I write a lot about art and architecture, landscape, and the impact of technology on culture, but I haven’t written about coding since the 1980s, when I sold my first article to Creative Computing magazine. Back then I was a high school kid, spending hours working in both BASIC and 6502 assembler on the VIC-20. I ...

A pretty blistering report on UK airport expansion - from the House of Commons Audit Committee.
-No evidence of net benefits.
-Will impair net zero.
-Decisions being taken without the benefit of updated policy.
Airport expansion and climate and nature targets https://

These butterflies pick host plants where the temperatures are more comfortable, even if they're less nutritious (but it's not clear from this data that the nutritional variation is biologically significant?)
https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.15.688506

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
Heliozoans are a group of amoeboid protists found commonly in both fresh and saltwater. They were termed sun-animalcules due to their spherical shape and distinctive radiating microtubules, which support axiopods used to capture food and facilitate movement. Some will also capture symbiotic algal cells which provide energy through photosynthesis. Heliozoa is &quo…

So originally we were going to maybe go to our local NoKings thing, but then I had a client call I had to do in Boston, so we decided to do the one on the commons.
So… does that make me a “paid” protester?

«Digital commons is a bigger call than digital autonomy. It’s a better call because digital commons gets you digital autonomy, but not always the other way around. Almost everything we do today is Digitally Uncommon.»
Really great talk by @… on where much of the tech is currently stuck and how commoning can be away out – if paired with the right focus on delivering quality!
#commons

Because it's populated by cheshire cats.
https://qoto.org/@bibliolater/115600269765129742

Bibliolater 📚 📜 🖋 (@bibliolater@qoto.org)
Attached: 1 image 🇳🇿 **Why does New Zealand keep disappearing from world maps?** _Cooper-Jones points out that even a New Zealand government 404 error page once displayed a world map missing the country entirely, with a cheeky message: "We’re sorry, something’s missing…"_ 🔗 https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/books/why-does-new-zealand-keep-disappearing-from-world-maps. #NewZealand #NZ #Maps #Cartography #Image attribution: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Common…

Much thanks and heartfelt support to @… for writing up the kind of article that I, too, have been dreading to have to write: that absolutist OSS is bad and we protect the commons with fair licensing, non-commercial and otherwise

"Protect our Pollinators" Grafitti on a side street near the Ithaca Commons
#photo #photography #ithaca #grafitti

«Nowadays the commons that we built is the feedlot of large language models, and increasingly also its waste pond. The software we make is free, but the system in which it is made is not»
Yeah, it feels very clear by now that licensing might be a necessary condition for building our software commons, but it's far from being sufficient.
/HT @…
https://wingolog.org/archives/2025/12/17/in-which-our-protagonist-dreams-of-laurels

Making some progress with that. Including uploading this Peruvian interpretation of The Last Supper in Machupicchu pueblo, featuring local clothing as well as food that looks like it's corn or quinoa!
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_last_supper_painting_in_the_Virgen_del_Carmen_Church_in_Macchupicchu_pueblo.jpg

Gorgeous 𝐶𝑜𝑙𝑒𝑢𝑠 leaves spotted in a bed in the Ithaca Commons
#plants #photo #photography #ithaca …

Finally done creating a bookmarklet that lets me do a series of three clean-up #Wikibase edits on #WikimediaCommons files for this notorious user that uploads thousands of files.
The edits replace a creator=<some value> statement into a known value referring to this user’s

File:04578jfRecoletos Church Bulletin Baluarte San Andres Landmarks Intramurosfvf 46.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Spent some time today to use my GPS tracks and geo-located images to improve #OpenStreetMap around the trail to/from Choquequirao.
Next up will be doing the same for the trail to Machu Picchu - and then getting some images from along the way on Wikimedia Commons.

"To realize the vision of a truly digital commons in the European Union – one built on openness, participation, and resilience – we need the active support of public institutions, civil society, and developers for the #Fediverse."
Talk & video by @… :
https://www.sfscon.it/talks/from-open-source-to-open-spaces/

A lot of online commons & communities - including the people that maintain them and make them sing - are facing "cultural" or "digital" pollution of their spaces. This can be due to intentional pollution, like misinformation campaigns, but also by well-meaning contributions that end up overwhelming the community capacity.
And of course, "generative AI" has turned up the rate and frequency for this: It's easier than ever to "flood" our digital ecosystems with generated text.
🧵 2/X

Or could methods from the environmental sciences maybe be adapted to the dynamics of digital communities/commons, to better understand these processes?
And, just as importantly (if not more so), could they help us to take better care of our digital spaces and maintain them as vibrant ecosystems that continue thriving?
Again, if that sounds of interest, e.g. as someone who maintains or contributes to communities, or as a social or environmental scientist, please get in touch with us!
🧵 5/5

Sometimes I wonder what ministers do:
“The security minister, Dan Jarvis, confirmed the alert had been sent out in a lunchtime Commons statement.“

As part of my work with @…, I have written up some ideas about understanding online communities as ecosystems and how it could help us conserve & maintain them by adapting methods from the environmental sciences to model digital pollution. This could apply to communities & commons including #opensource #wikipedia or the #fediverse.
We're looking for folks to collaborate on this with us, so if that sounds up your alley, please get in touch!
A small 🧵 below. 1/X
https://citizensandtech.org/2025/12/online-communities-as-ecosystems/

"No Justice No Peas" street art on an alley off the Ithaca Commons
#photo #photography #art #streetart

Zinnia I saw somewhere around the Ithaca Commons this summer
#photo #photography #flowers #bloomscrolling